The stories as I offer them are not translations but my own versions. Literal translations from the Finnish would make small appeal to the general reader. To English ears the Finnish is stiff, bald, and monotonous. One has only to read or attempt to read Kirby's excellent translation of the _Kalevala_ to realize the truth of this statement. So I make no apology for retelling these tales in a manner more likely to prove entertaining to the English reader, whether child or adult. In some form or other all the tales in this book may be found in the various folklore collections made by Eero Salmelainen, one of the patriotic young scholars who followed in Lönnrot's footsteps. His books were sponsored by the Society of Finnish Literature and used in its campaign to bring back the Finnish language to the Finns at a time when Swedish was the official language of the country. Full of local color as these stories are, it would be vain to pretend that they are not, for the most part, variants of stories told the world over. All that I can claim for them is that they are dramatic and picturesque, that they are told with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish, and that they are certainly new to the generality of English readers. _The Three Chests_, so characteristic in feeling of a country famous for its lakes and marshes, is the variant of a German story which Grimm gives as _Fitcher's Bird_. Of _The Forest Bride_ I have found variants in the folklore of many lands. There are several very beautiful ones in the Russian; in other books I myself have retold two, one current among the Czechs and one among the Serbians; Grimm has two different versions in _The Three Feathers_ and _The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat_; and Madame d'Aulnoy has used the same story in her elaborate tale, _The White Cat_. There is a well-known Oriental version of _Mighty Mikko_ in which the part of the fox is played by a jackal and I am sure that Mikko's faithful retainer, though neither city-bred nor polished, is after all pretty closely related to that most debonnaire of Frenchmen, _Puss in Boots_. Perrault probably and Madame d'Aulnoy certainly are in turn indebted to Straparola. And so it goes. The little cycle of animal stories included under _Mikko the Fox_ will of course instantly invite comparison with the Beast Epic of _Reynard the Fox_. The two have many episodes in common and both have episodes to be found in Æsop and in those books of animal analogues, widely read in mediæval times, _Physiologus_ and the _Disciplina Clericalis_ of Petrus Alfonsus. The _Reynard_ as we have it is a finished satire on church and state and in its present form has been current in Europe since the twelfth century. It was thought at one time that the animal stories found in Finland were debased versions of the _Reynard_ stories, but scholars are now of opinion that they antedate _Reynard_ and are similar to the earlier simpler stories upon which the _Reynard_ cycle was originally built. This makes the little Finnish tales of great interest to the student. Needless to say I do not present them for this reason but because they seem to me charming merely as fables. The animals here are not the clerics and the judges and the nobles that the _Reynard_ animals are, but plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human. I have taken one liberty with spelling. I have transliterated...